CPOMS entries/process

[Findingpeace28]

Hi all,
A bit of advice/insight please. I heard of CPOMs for the first time this year. Since then, I’ve seen some of the entries made about my children, mainly my older son. Most of the entries were news to me and I’m wondering if anyone knows what the correct process is for safeguarding:

1. should the school have notified me of concerns recorded on CPOMs and recorded my response?
2. what are my options if I want to escape a complaint regarding how the school is using CPOMs because I personally don’t see how it can be right to record incidents surreptitiously when there could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for their concern/observation.
3. what is the guidance regarding informing parents about this system?

Thank you in advance for any help.

*escalate, not escape.

The school should have a Child Protection and Safeguarding policy available on their website.

I've just checked ours and explains in the policy what should be recorded in CPOMs but it doesn't explain what the system is.

You can also read Keeping Children Safe in Education which details what schools are supposed to do in terms of safeguarding.

I'm fairly sure that parents at our school are not informed of everything that goes into CPOMs.

It's completely reasonable to ask the Head why you don't get told about every CPOMs entry and decide if the explanation you receive is sufficient. You can then complain to the Head and then to the Governors if you're not satisfied with the response from the Head. But check the policies first and I would only complain if the school hasn't followed the policy.

CPOMs is just the software a lot of schools use.

What you need to do is look for the school's safeguarding policy as that will provide detail on how they communicate any safeguarding concerns / incidents to parents.

My child's school's safeguarding policy states they will normally discuss any concerns with parents except in cases where the school needs to seek advice from other agencies first. In the latter case they need to record why the decision not to speak to parents first was taken.

Safeguarding is built on people with basic training writing a concern either on paper or on cpoms, and the more qualified person looking at the concern and deciding if it needs looking into.

You arent supposed to mount your own investigation as to why something is the way it is. You just fill out the form saying 'bob was in the same dirty trousers for 6 days'.

I'm now wondering if things recorded on CPOMs might not raise to the level of a safeguarding concern, in which case no discussion with parents may be had.

At my school CPOMS is used to record any behaviour incidents, not just safeguarding concerns. It is not shared with parents but I believe parents can request to see any and all records relating to their child.

Thank you 🙏🏾. I did read their safeguarding policy but I don’t remember seeing anything specific about CPOMS. I’ll check again.

Thanks for your reply. Well, the problem now is that Social Services have now come to the conclusion of ‘emotional abuse’ based on the aggregate of these CPOMS entries. In the first place, school never escalated any of the entries as far as I’m aware. And then I never got the right of response to explain certain incidents and some of the stuff recorded was so ridiculous and I’m just gobsmacked eg apparently one morning my son went into class upset, without his coat with cold breakfast. Etc etc

Thanks. I did request all the information they’d recorded but they refused. I’d let it be until I received some paperwork from them with some more records and a conclusion that emotional abuse had been taking place.

Thanks and I get that. But unfortunately it takes on a whole new meaning when something unrelated happens and these entries are used by social services to accuse a parent of emotional abuse, when most of them weren’t informed to the parent in order to get context/more information about what might have happened. So that’s the dilemma I’m in because I’m all for safeguarding but not without context because that amounts to some type of entrapment imo.

Thank you very much everyone, I appreciate your quick responses 😊

I will do exactly as your last paragraph lays out, many thanks.

Like swordfish says CPOMS is just the software.

It's a way of recording lots of pieces of information which when they are put together make a picture.

So, if a child in my class came to school with no coat came to school with no coat, I'd put it on CPOMS.

Something like

'Ben arrived at school this morning without his coat. I asked him if he had brought a coat this morning and he told me that he couldn't find it and his mum said they would be late for school if they looked any longer'.

On its own, that's one incident. It happens. But if there are lots of things that show that Ben might not be being looked after appropriately then the safeguarding lead will step in.

We log anything and everything on CPOMS. It's a faster way to produce a "paper" trail than trawling through emails, and means that the safeguarding lead and/or Head of Year or equivalent can see everything. If we notified every parent of everything it would be vaguely nightmarish for all concerned.

Social Services can't automatically see that data until the school provides it. But the school has a statutory duty to pass certain information on. In addition to school policies, this is governed by a long document called "Keeping Children Safe In Education" which you might want to read?

We also have to log parental contact so we would be caught in an endless loop if we contacted a parent about everything.

Yes and I agree. But safeguarding never stepped in at any point and as far as I can tell, there’s only one incident of no coat and it’s exactly as you described, there was an innocent explanation-he forgot or left it in the car or something. But the problem is that they recorded like 5 different types of incident, never called me regarding any , told me they didn’t feel it rose to the level that needed escalating but SS have now weaponised that🤷🏾‍♀️

Hmmm. With all due respect, this is exactly what I don’t get. Recording anything and everything and not getting the other side of the story. The nightmare scenario is not having a bar set for recording things because children are children and parents are parents and everyone is human. So there seems to be an indiscriminate amount of information being recorded and not clarified. I get that they need to safeguard children but this way seems to be skewed and a shock to a parent who knows what happened but no one cared to ask them. Anyway, it is what it is.

Recording anything and everything and not getting the other side of the story.

Maybe this is the time for your side if the story. It would be ridiculous if they were ringing you up to justify why a child didn't have a coat on one day but now there are five things so you can say what happened.

@Findingpeace28 I completely get your point. In another world, someone would have made that phone call before referring on to Social Services. I don't want to sound at all harsh here (sorry!) but in our real world, it's probably a semi-automated process in some schools, as the Safeguarding Lead can be a very overstretched job.

In those awful situations where there are real safeguarding issues, not like yours, it's probably better for Social Services to get involved sooner rather than later, and without the school giving the parent/s too much warning so they can hide things. It can be hard to tell which is which from the CPOMS reports.

PS thank you, and I will read the suggested resource.

Thank you😊. Yeah, I get it.

@Findingpeace28 Reading KCSIE is incredibly depressing. It's a long catalogue of all the worst things that can happen. If it's a few days of missing coats etc, you'll see that Social Services will be delighted to clear the case up quickly (and possibly be annoyed that the school referred it to them, but as I say, that is what happens in overstretched systems).

Can I ask you if you’d record a parent calling school to ask about a poem about World War 2? My younger son came home with the poem which had a lot of references about death and war so I was, almost alarmed. So I called school and said I didn’t think it was age-appropriate (my son was in year 5 at this point). But the teacher called me back and explained they’d been teaching them about the world wars (which I didn’t know is in the primary school curriculum as I didn’t grow up in this country) and that they give them context etc. so I said okay and left it; but this phone call was recorded in CPOMS… what would be a safeguarding concern over that?

@PhotoDad how do you know that there isn't a a real cause concern in the op's case? Just because she says so?
In my experience, the bar is set incredibly high for social services intervention and emotional abuse is the hardest to prove.
The fact that an investigation is taking place, makes me think that the school are doing EXACTLY the right thing .

One of the schools i work at records every parental contact on cpoms but not under the safeguarding tab, it has its own special tab.

Both schools i work at record behaviour, sen and safeguarding on different tabs. They arent accessible by everyone only people who are supposed to see them.